The Internet has been expanding into a more mobile Internet by using radio cellular technologies to connect billions of people and electronic devices. An Internet of Things (IoT) is what some people envision to expand the communication landscape for the majority of electronic devices.
IoT refers to the connection of billions of physical or virtual objects on the Internet cloud. This enables these objects to exchange information not only among themselves but with the environments and servers that provide services to benefit the devices and end users. Although this concept seems simple, there are significant challenges in wirelessly communicating with billions of objects.
Mobile internet services are mainly designed for human communications that include both human-to-human and human-to-server communications. Even though human communications utilize many devices, such as personal computers (PCs), notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, such devices provide similar interfaces and services to users (e.g. video, voice, and multimedia). In contrast, the machine-to machine (M2M) communication market is highly fragmented, with different vertical sectors that target different services ranging from telemetry (e.g. smart meter, remote monitoring), telematics (e.g. fleet tracking), to surveillance video. These M2M services have very different specifications. For example, surveillance video uses video codecs and protocols for streaming video uploads that are not desired for telemetry applications. It may be difficult to use a common wireless technology for devices supporting various M2M services, since it will be so expensive and complicated to scale for billions of devices.